Three friends attempt to complete each game in their entire PC games catalogue in alphabetical order, with only one life per game. Which games will they clock? Which will they fail miserably? Which ones will even install after all these years? One chance, one life, no mistakes.

Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Commando & Conquer

Some awesome ships I'm not allowed to use

In spite of my initial desire to rush for Orcas, when presented with the two missions on offer I decided to take Hampton Roads back and gain access to Grenadiers. The main reason for this is that the Hampton Roads mission is a Commando mission which is always good for a laugh and, I felt, would give me the best chance of success. Only having to concentrate on one unit and being able to take my time would stop me getting tangled up trying to do too much and accidentally walking my troops into a volcano or something.

I could finally set the difficulty to hard too and stop feeling like a terrible charlatan.

For those of you unfamiliar with RTSs there's always an equivalent of the Commando which you only generally have access to for a few missions. The idea is to break the monotony of base-building and large scale troop manoeuvers by giving you just one insanely powerful unit. In this case I was controlling a unit who shreds infantry in moments from long range, has a jet pack to jump walls and can demolish buildings with a single click. The map is also littered with exploding barrels to finish off vehicles as well as power-ups to restore his health and level him up to an even more unstoppable beast.

Destroy this

First things first - kill any patrolling units and destroy the airbase which is harassing our warships in the port. This was easy enough (turns out the Commando barely takes damage, even from flame troopers) and on the way I pick up a couple of crates that level him up and make him even harder to kill.

After destroying the airbase I get some snipers, some APCs and the ability to 'mark' targets for my destroyers to bombard. However, at the same point a secondary mission pops up - destroy the remaining forces using only the Commando. Well, this being The Ninth Life I had to go for it and I started probing round the edges of the NOD base to see what kind of resistance I faced.

Then destroy these

Troops are no problem so I don't need to worry about them. There are rocket firing motorbikes which it takes me aaaages to kill, but they do me little damage so that's more annoying than deadly. My main concern is right in the middle of the base. A flame tank. Deadly against troops and entrenched buildings, I could only assume that a one-on-one with it would result in a fiery death (especially considering how long it takes the Commando to kill vehicles).

My strategy then was to hit and run. Using the jet pack I'd leap over a wall kill as many troops and buildings as I could and then leap out when the flame tank arrived. Then, when the tank moved back to it's patrol route I'd hop over again, head a bit deeper and destroy the next target.

This worked like a charm and soon the base was rubble and the mission was complete.

Behind the rotating victory symbol the AI was still running and my Commando was engulfed in flame but that didn't matter. Another mission down and we're off to get helicopters!

And for those of you who thought I'd make a pun on 'going commando', shame on you, we would never resort to such obvious old man jokes...